Once, long ago, I was staying the night at a friend’s house when his family’s very old Basset Hound, Frances, took an extremely unpleasant shit on the kitchen floor. There was a sturdy mound of dense turds coated in an expanding puddle of glistening, phlegmy ooze, and it had a stench that could break a person’s mind, and it looked exactly like Yahoo columnist and college sports knower Pat Forde’s Thursday night dinner.

Paprikash is a delightful chicken dish with a signature fiery red color, the result of lots of (you guessed it) sweet paprika. It is with equal parts admiration and horror that I must tell you now that Forde ate that slimy mess, and has so far survived the ordeal, and reported that it tasted “better than it looks.” That could mean almost anything.